Becoming More

By Mark Nepper

In the before times I had started anticipating retirement. Recently retired teachers had this glow about them. Former colleagues would say the recent retirees looked so healthy. They looked so happy. They looked so content. They often attributed their healthy glow to a life without the need to lesson plan or log hours grading student work. Retirement life sounded appealing.

Though I knew I would face many and difficult adjustments, I had a plan. That plan involved taking on more work with the Greater Madison Writing Project. It also involved travel, a lifelong passion. I planned to live in Italy for several months in the fall. Soon after March 13th, 2020, though, when it became obvious the world had changed, drastically and probably for a long time, I fought the obvious and startling conclusion. I struggled to accept that the world had lurched into a new set of parameters. Like everyone else, though, I started to face a new reality. Everything I planned for the start of retirement disappeared with the unrelenting pandemic.

Retirement was really going to suck.

The start of the 2020/21 school year brought the biggest identity crisis I have ever faced. I missed the rhythms of teaching, the routines of preparing for, entering into and proceeding through a school year. I missed intellectual conversations with colleagues that spurred me to new thinking, new ideas, new approaches to teaching. I missed students. Oh, how I missed students and the connections and communities I built with them. Even though I wasn’t teaching, I struggled through night after night after night of school anxiety dreams. Honestly, I’m still having them. I thought the dreams would end with retirement. Silly me. They only intensified because I never really got to end my career with the kind of closure I had anticipated, a victory lap of sorts. I wanted to go through all of the traditional endings of a school year. But my career just faded away. I missed so much.

All of these missings made me physically ache.

I shuffled through days, lost, never really knowing where I was going, and certainly never getting anywhere. Time passed with great ambivalence. Everything seemed insignificant. Always a reader, I planned to make serious headway through stacks of unread books. For the first time in my life, reading brought me no joy. It just filled time. I found myself reading a few pages and setting down the book, unmoved by all the things I have loved about stories.

I embarked on new hobbies, new learning. Some I embraced, some I discarded quickly. I am learning how to paint with watercolors through online courses. Of the many paintings I have attempted, I kept three. I really like those three. I just might frame one of them and hang it on a wall. I am learning how to make rings on a lathe. The learning curve is steep. Out of about 30-plus attempts, one proved successful. I am learning things that will become mainstays in my next phase of life, and I am trying to embrace the failure that accompanies learning. Impatience, though, is frustrating me. Everything seems hard right now.

Because of Covid, I logged so much alone time that I realized I got kind of tired of myself. Great, now what? I thought.

Through it all I kept circling back to one daunting question: If I no longer am a teacher, what the hell am I?

For most of my adult life I identified as a teacher. That identity fulfilled me. I always told people that I really liked teaching. I really did. No, really! Truthfully, I loved teaching. Sure, I experienced bad days that sometimes stretched into bad weeks. I survived one really bad semester. Through it all I loved being a teacher. I loved telling people I taught. In retirement I didn’t know what to tell people.

With wistfulness I told people I met “I was a teacher.” WAS

Friends tried to prop me up, telling me retirement didn’t change anything. I was still a teacher, I would always be a teacher.

I struggled to believe them.

However, with time I began to concede the point. After a 30-year teaching career, I built up knowledge and skill sets related to teaching. My skill set didn’t disappear just because I started drawing a pension on July 1, 2020. I knew I still could engage in meaningful conversations with teachers about the practice. I could listen. I could offer support and encouragement for those struggling to navigate the vast changes that virtual, hybrid or face-to-face teaching brought to this most unusual school year.

I missed the grounding work teachers did last summer for the GMWP yearlong professional development institute called “What We Can Become.” I sensed, though, that I could still activate those skills I spent a career developing. I sought more involvement with GMWP. For the past several months I have been coaching and consulting with the a smaller school district in central Wisconsin. I recently spent time in the classroom teaching, actually teaching students in a traditional classroom setting. Though I hadn’t engaged in that kind of teaching in a year, it felt easy and good and right. Actually, it felt more than right. It was glorious.

Mark Dziedzic and Bryn Orum, with the Greater Madison Writing Project, welcomed me into the “What We Can Become” institute. Participating in this institute has been fulfilling. Even though I don’t work with students or have a classroom, I have felt like a teacher again.

When I enter meeting dates for the yearlong institute in my calendar, I identify them as GMWP Becoming. I like what that says. My life has changed. I have started to embrace some of these changes.

It occurs to me I am becoming more. Not less.

I don’t know where this becoming will lead. Somewhere good, I’m sure.

I do know now I will always be what I have always been.

I am a teacher.